Heitkamp defends gun vote

Heidi Heitkamp’s office was flooded with calls from North Dakotans in the run-up to last week’s high-profile vote to expand background checks on gun purchasers.

The overwhelming consensus: Vote no.

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In an interview in her office this week, the freshman Democrat defended the biggest vote of her young Senate career, when she joined with three other Democrats and most Senate Republicans to oppose expanding background checks during commercial gun sales.

“I think I always had a reputation as somebody who will listen, somebody who is pretty independent-minded but also believes that at the end of the day, you got to listen to your constituents,” Heitkamp said. “In this office, the calls literally were before the last day at least 7 to 1 against that bill. This was after a series of very extensive ad campaigns done in my state saying call me and tell me to support it.”

Heitkamp’s opposition came after intense lobbying by President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, Mark Kelly — and families of the victims from the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School last year. The vote turned Heitkamp from an unexpected victor of a 2012 Senate race to a liberal punching bag, fielding a sharp jab from Obama’s former chief of staff, Bill Daley, who demanded a refund of his campaign donation.

It all amounted to an unusual amount of attention for a woman who hailed from a town of 90 people, hadn’t held an elected office for a dozen years and is so new to the Senate that she is still cramped in a small ground-level temporary office. But Heitkamp’s vote last week serves as a stark reminder that Obama’s domestic agenda rests largely on wooing both Republicans and red-state Democrats who are unafraid to buck their party.

Heitkamp said that she may have “disappointed” many, but she heard an outpouring of opposition back home that she couldn’t ignore, forcing her to cast a critical vote against the plan.

Asked about polls showing more than 90 percent of voters supporting expanded background checks, including back home, Heitkamp doubted that was truly indicative of public opinion. She compared the polls to her improbable Senate win showing her down double digits to Republican Rick Berg just weeks before Election Day.

“That wasn’t true either,” she quipped.

“There was a lot of concern in North Dakota that there is always this push for one size fits all,” she said. “North Dakota has one of the highest rates of gun ownership and the lowest rate of gun violence. And I think people there look at this from the standpoint that: This is my Second Amendment right. This is part of our culture in North Dakota. And they expressed those opinions to me pretty loud and clear.”

Heitkamp’s position underscores the fragility of the Senate Democratic majority and the constant challenges facing Obama’s second-term agenda. In order to keep their Senate majority, Democrats recruited moderates like Heitkamp who could be elected in red states. But those same Democrats are hardly reliable votes for Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) as they try to usher through an agenda on guns, immigration and the deficit before the 2014 midterm elections dominate the national landscape.